Slay the Spire 2 is absolutely slaying. The roguelike deck-builder, released in early access on Windows PC on Thursday, is having one of the biggest launches of 2026. Not only did its launch temporarily crash Steam, but it peaked at more than 400,000 concurrent players — the most for any roguelike on Valve’s PC storefront.
Shortly after its March 5 release, Slay the Spire 2 caused about half an hour of outages on Steam, Kotaku reports. As of this writing, Slay the Spire 2 has about 300,000 concurrent players, according to data from SteamDB. It peaked at 430,456 players at around 9 a.m. EDT, suggesting some players are true sickos, squeezing in runs before they go to work. (We get it.)
Slay the Spire 2‘s peak concurrent player count more than triples the previous record set by Mewgenics, less than a month ago, for the most concurrent players who’ve played a roguelike on Steam. On Feb. 15, the cat-breeding tactical game hit a peak of 115,428 players, according to SteamDB. And that number was also record-setting, beating the 112,947 players set by Hades 2 in September 2025.
While the Steam concurrents horse race is a limited and myopic way to view interest in games, it’s clear we’re in the middle of a roguelike renaissance. All three of these record-setters launched amid breathless anticipation. Mewgenics was famously in development (to some degree) for more than a decade. Hades 2 was the follow-up to one of the most widely hailed games of all time, and spent a year accruing buzz in early access. Slay the Spire 2 arrives seven years after its predecessor to smash records and indisputably escape the confines of its genre niche. But it’s worth bearing in mind this is just an early access release that’s not spread across multiple major platforms. If this is how big it is now, just how big will the full launch of Slay the Spire 2 be?